<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>How Do You Like (Your Eggs in the Morning) by DisGrace4</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29142288">How Do You Like (Your Eggs in the Morning)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DisGrace4/pseuds/DisGrace4'>DisGrace4</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Black Sails, Black Sails (TV) RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternative Meeting, Canon Disabled Character, Cooking, Curtains Fic, Developing Relationship, Domestic Fluff, Domesticity, Don't worry Silver is still a little shit, First Kiss, Flint is soft, Fluff, Gratuitous Song Lyrics, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Modern AU, Past James/Thomas, References to Depression, completely self-indulgent</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:08:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,074</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29142288</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DisGrace4/pseuds/DisGrace4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>How does James Flint like his eggs in the morning?</p><p>However John Silver happens to be making them.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton (past)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>How Do You Like (Your Eggs in the Morning)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“How do you like your eggs in the morning?”</p><p>His voice was far deeper than it had any right to be and his singing, although not terribly bad, would not have won him any competitions. Still, it was enough to make Flint huff to himself as he took the stairs one by one.</p><p>The carpet was thin and worn under his feet; it had never mattered when he lived alone. The house had become little more than a stopover, somewhere to lay his head at the end of a long day, for near enough a decade. A decade in which Flint had refused to dust more often than necessary to prevent it becoming a health hazard, hadn’t re-grouted the bathroom tiles once, and had learned how to eat three meals a day without producing a single dish to wash.</p><p>Now, the house was full of noise. The singing had woken him from his sleep and, though he knew Silver would not have intended it that way, it still made something in his chest twist to find that someone was inserting themselves into his daily routine again. The smell, savoury and spiced, had been secondary. It had taken the retired naval captain longer to notice it, though it had been enough to drive him out of bed immediately when he did.</p><p>The little shit had conned his way onto Flint’s crew through a combination of Hal Gates’s natural sympathy and Flint’s exhaustion with the constant coming and going of cooks. His tours promised a full meal en route, and Billy’s mum’s sausage casseroles were beginning to take a toll on their reviews. Flint wouldn’t care - he didn’t need the money himself - if it weren’t for the scant, skeletal crew which was dependent on the income it generated. Billy was using it to fund some liberal arts bullshit, Gates to prop up his own faltering boat hire business at the marina. Flint himself had only really started it at Miranda’s insistence.</p><p>Apparently, he needed socialising.</p><p>Easy for her to say. She only visited for a handful of days at a time. Holidays and special occasions, times when she wasn’t fighting for justice, peace and an end to world hunger. She hadn’t needed to fit her life into the spaces around the gaps Thomas had left behind; she had gone and filled them with endless cease and desist notices, waiver agreements, and N.D.As.</p><p>Silver didn’t give a shit about any gaps. He bulldozed his way through James’ life. Threw himself into the empty armchair by the fire, leafed through the untouched books on the shelves, and sang in the kitchen in the early hours when it ought to have been quiet. His presence had been deafening from the start.</p><p>John was a shit cook, too. That had been established on his very first day. Salmon ought to have a been a simple dish- there was little more involved than warming it through for serving - but the charred, smoking husk on the plate that afternoon suggested otherwise. It had only grown worse from there. Pork which even Billy, a hand-to-mouth student, couldn’t choke down. Potatoes which, for the love of fuck, had never even seen boiling water in their short lives. Dessert should have been a relief. It was, after all, the end of the meal. Instead, it was the beginning of a three-quarter hour wait. The sun had begun to dip below the distant horizon, and Flint had exhausted every fact, figure and fable he had ever known about the pirates which had once terrorized the bay before Silver had finally surfaced from the galley. His uniform, a simple polo shirt and slacks combination that Flint had tossed his way that morning, was unrecognisable. If Flint didn’t know it couldn’t be reached from the galley, he would have sworn the man had spent the afternoon at the engine, elbows deep in grease. It would explain the smear of grime across his cheekbone.</p><p>Immediately refunds and grovelling apologies had been necessary to preserve the reputation of the company.</p><p>“How do you like your eggs in the morning? I like mine with a kiss.”</p><p>Impossibly, his voice had dropped with the last word; it was barely a rumble through the quiet of the house. If Silver had heard the creak of Flint’s bedroom door or his footfall on the stairs, he didn’t seem to care. That seemed to be a general trend in the man’s life, from Flint’s perspective. He was entirely unabashed, be it about asking to stay in his spare room after unequivocally proving that his resume was complete and utter bullshit, or crossing the room in front of James as he ate his oatmeal in the smallest towel known to man.</p><p>Flint wasn’t a prude. It was just longer than he cared to admit since he had seen that much skin in one go.</p><p>“Boiled or fried? I’m satisfied as long as I get my kiss.”</p><p>Sliver had drawn out ‘satisfied’ longer than the song called for. It set it a little off-rhythm in a way which would have made Dean Martin question why he bothered, but somehow it worked.</p><p>Flint wondered if he did this at work. He was well-suited to pulling pints and charming customers, old and young. Eleanor had taken him on, albeit reluctantly, at Flint’s insistence, but it was clear that he had flourished there. He raked in tips every night and, twice now, Flint had found a screwed up receipt with a drunken scrawl of a phone number in the dish for keys by the front door. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him in the bar when business was brisk and he was in the rhythm of the thing, singing to whoever he happened to be serving at that particular moment. James wasn’t a jealous man, but, God, everyone had a weak point, and that particular image was certainly his.</p><p>He slipped into the kitchen unnoticed. Silver - John, he reminded himself, though the name never seemed to stick, no matter how many times he was reminded of it - was standing with his back to him, pivoting on his prosthetic leg in front of the stove as he danced to his own singing. A slow, swinging thing. It would have made Thomas laugh, especially after he had insisted that James learn to waltz because 'it’s as easy as walking, dear.' The memory drew a soft noise of amusement from Flint, warmth flooding where the nameless beast had curled below his breastbone.</p><p>Maybe he would tell Silver about that night one day. Maybe he would teach him to waltz. It wouldn’t be the same, but the difference wouldn’t be bad. Not unlike pulling off a sticking plaster that had been left in place far past its designated purpose of protecting the bare flesh below. Not unlike that night when he had fallen into Silver’s arms - a weak, willing, desperate thing - and they had spent the rest of the evening curled around one another on the sofa, beers sweating and forgotten on the coffee table. It hadn’t gone any further, but it had been a beginning and an end.</p><p>Silver had noticed him by the time he dragged himself back to the present, though he hadn’t turned. The awareness was written in the way he had straightened, head tipped just a little to one side. James wanted to step up close behind him, press his face into the back of his neck and breath against the skin there. He second-guessed it when he remembered that Silver burned himself without any assistance whatsoever.</p><p>Instead, he went a somewhat more considerate route and crossed to the coffee machine, which had yet to be roused that morning. The scent, immediate and rich, was mouth-watering. The eggs - simmering tomatoes and onions, fragrant with paprika and cumin - were less so. Though the smell was good, Silver had been overzealous in his mixing and the eggs, which ought to have been broken onto the top so they cooked through while maintaining a perfectly runny yolk, were more scrambled than whole.</p><p>Silver caught him looking and quirked a challenging eyebrow. He had been learning to cook as part of an ongoing agreement when he moved in with Flint, who had refused to live with a constant health hazard. It had become a point of contention early on; they had wildly differing views on the definition of ‘edible.’ Now, though, things had settled into some form of equilibrium. Silver no longer posed an immediate danger, even if his technique left plenty to be desired.</p><p>The man was still ready for James to criticize him, as he often did simply for the biting retort it inevitably won him. Instead, though, Flint simply smiled, rubbing sleep out of the corner of his eye with the heel of his hand.</p><p>Silver prodded at the eggs a final time with the spatula and, content that they would not be ruined by a few moments left unattended, stepped away from the stove, and into Flint’s space.</p><p>“How do you like your eggs in the morning?<br/>
I like mine with a kiss.<br/>
Up or down, I’ll never frown,<br/>
Eggs can be almost bliss,<br/>
Just as long as I get my kiss.”</p><p>There was no questioning what Silver was asking now. He was looking at Flint and, though the Captain had been out of the game for a long time, he wasn’t blind. He knew what it meant when Silver’s eyes flickered down to his lips, breaking eye-contact just long enough to be sure it was noticed.</p><p>“You skipped some lyrics.” He pointed out, voice rough from the combination of the early morning and the way his mouth went dry when Silver looked at him that way.</p><p>Silver simply laughed, too used to Flint’s sense of humour to take it personally. He was always quick to laugh and faster to forgive. James would have thought it foolish, on anyone who didn’t wear it the way Silver did. He had a habit of knowing everyone in a room well enough that he could steer the conversation the way he wanted it to go. It was entirely self-preservation; the habits of a man who had been on his own far longer than he ought to have been. He had told Flint that it was already the longest he had stayed in one place for years. At that point, it had only made James worry that he meant he would wake to find him gone one morning. Now, though, he knew it meant that it was the first time John had let himself believe he wouldn’t need to run in the night.</p><p>Later, Flint wouldn’t be able to recount which one of them moved first. They came together in the middle, like the boat meeting the wave. A hand in the back of his hair pulled him down enough so that Silver could reach. The first press of their lips was short and, while everything in James demands more, he didn’t push it. There would be plenty of time for that later. For now, he could revel in the burn of his lips, carrying the sensation with him out onto the open sea.</p><p>Silver was smiling at him when he drew back, the little shit. He knew exactly what he was doing. His hair, which Flint now knew he bundled on top of his head for sleep from one too many meetings in the small hours, was haphazard and tangled across his shoulders. Though it wasn’t quite the wild, wind-swept coils of a day on the sea, not crisp with salt and spray as they had been when they had met, James wanted to reach out and touch them. Perhaps, he would twist one around his finger, just to watch how it bounced back into place unchanged when he released it.</p><p>“Come on. You’re supposed to sing the next line.” John had never heard him sing, but it was the closest James had felt for years. “How do you like your eggs in the morning?” The shorter man prompted, unabashed by the lack of response.</p><p>“Not burnt, that’s for fucking sure.” James leaned across him to switch off the stovetop, gratuitous in pushing close to him. Close enough that he could feel John’s breath against this temple and his curls against his cheek.</p><p>Their breakfast, though overcooked, was good. This thing between them, though new, strange, and unvoiced, was perfect.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>